The Fruits of Knowledge

The consequences of technology are plural, with many cascade effects. In this essay, I examine the synergy of technology and humanity. Our use of technology involves the fundamental principle of technological use: their primary human cost and secondary technological gain. Broadly speaking, technology undoes original human capacity and enfolds it into technological power. There is an optimum here, where man gives up certain skills in order to obtain greater benefits. But there is also a dangerous precedent, setting the scene for where I, because this is a radically personal subject, may give up the responsibility, the effort and the work that makes me a human being. With such extreme stakes, let us begin.

I frequently hear that technology are convenient, fun and liberatory. The claim that technology is convenient is made from the recognition of its ability to accomplish specific tasks easily. Much less interest is usually given to the dependency it fosters on its direct users and, indirectly, those around them. This dualism, their enabling and inoculation of dependence, has been described by various thinkers in writing, beginning at least with Plato in the Phaedrus. In it, writing, a primordial tool, is introduced to Pharaoh, the leader of Egypt. The Pharaoh does not like the idea. Plato writes,

“For this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality” (Jowett, 1892).

This is the twist: the same tool that we have come to associate with wisdom and intelligence today was critiqued by the ancients as a poor substitute for both. What, then, is the kind of understanding that the Pharaoh described, loosed from the written word? This is a challenging concept. It is something like an intimate, concrete understanding of one’s subject matter, rather than collecting words about it. Words are only words. They hopefully describe their object or subject, but what one wants to see in wise people is a reflection and communication of the human encounter with truth and the world, where the reference of the word is not more words, but the primary sense. This can only come from living.

Another tool that demonstrates the parallel inclusion of dependence and gaining of technological mastery is the wheel. Introduced at least in the middle of the 4th millennium BC in Mesopotamia, modern-day Iraq, the wheel allows for the easy movement of heavy objects. The compensatory effect in the human being is the loss of the musculature and coordination that is required to move heavy objects without a wheel. Imagine asking a man used to moving objects with a wheel to move objects without it. This ability would be hampered. Despite this, there is significant gain achieved by its use: the easier, faster and less energetically-costly movement of items. This simple tool and its trade-offs demonstrates a clear principle of human cost and technological benefit: the human loses the fruit of direct involvement with a process and gains the fruit of its technical accomplishment.

To move to the 20th century AD, the loss of muscle and balance in the manual manipulation of goods through the use of the wheel is the same as the loss of connective neural tissue by our use of the internet, as we rely on it to make the connections for us rather than our own brains. Further, the benefit of the easy transport of goods by the wheel is the same as the rapid transport of information by the internet. The question for those of us personally interested in society is when the technological benefits of something are at the appropriate level, considering their human cost. In the case of a tool like the wheel, the human cost is not high and the technological gain is considerable. In the case of the internet, created in the 1960s to monitor the Vietnam battlefield by ARPA (now DARPA), the human cost is potentially grave and the technological gain is substantial. How may may we create a healthy relationship with this technology? The human cost is so immense that executive function among citizens is demonstrably declining, let alone attention spans less than those of goldfish. This consequence of our technology has been spun off and memed about, terming people zombies and NPCs (non-player characters; i.e., lacking decision-making and autonomy). The hypnosis is so great that psychologists, in the face of a society of deeper and deeper somnambulance, rather than being interested in promoting autonomy and self-directedness, are instead focusing on marketing, framing effects and winning awards like the Nobel Prize in Economics for researching how to “nudge,” i.e., manipulate people well.

A side note: one potential for the better implementation of the internet is self-regulating, self-verifying chains that automatize grunt, bureaucratic paperwork. The entirety of governmental contracts could become an app.

A side, side note: it is notable that the terminology of self-regulating and automated systems and self-regulated, autonomous human beings are lexically similar but about as far from each other in the primary sense as possible.

To quickly return to writing, what are its gains? Retrievable lexical relationships that systematize ourselves, the world and everything else. What are the costs? In the potentially most devastating manner, the atrophy of our words having direct application to our primary sense. The Good becomes abstract, when, to quote Ivan Illich, the good is another human being. What else could it be?

Writing discredits and disables the ability to form coherent understanding without writing or reading about it. Further, those who do not read and write are seen as ignorant and excluded from sectors of society. Literacy teaches a dependence on literacy, not how to live in truth with one another.

Our technology and tools have become the expected equipment of the postmodern citizen (please excuse the use of “postmodern,” denoting as it does the passe sigh of someone who is just over it). People without reading and writing, a car and a smartphone are seen as deficient. We are expected to use them, costs be castaway. This is a concern for those interested in “liberal” society. Unfortunately, many times, these technologies are not used to create a better society, but instead as pure entertainment and fun. I am not anti-fun, but I am wise enough to know when I am not living up to my potential and distracting myself from it. Entertainment is important, especially in a society of entertainment. For many people, they would not feel very many emotions if the film didn’t show them how. Many times, our relationships are so inchoate and our endurance so minute that we hardly spend time with one another or ourselves or God, preferring to spend time on our screens alone. This creates a soft bubble of asphyxiation, as what the human desires is the good, that is, a relationship with another human being.

Technology’s liberatory effects are those benefits just discussed. They simplify difficult or mundane tasks. Though they can be liberatory in their moment, they also create dependencies. People used to cars are unaccustomed to walk even blocks away, smartphones restrict the use of human reasoning and memory to establish history and ideas and televisions promote the shrinking of the individual personality to tell a story and the group ability to listen to a person outside of special effects and quick cuts. The virtualization of reality as being real only inasmuch as it is photographed, televised and put on the internet reifies and digitizes living for fake permanence, public relations and manipulation. Rather than enabling living in truth, I am now at the mercy of special effects companies and public relations firms. The technology created for communication, instead, manipulates.

The story begins there, but the dependency begins there, too. When the people, the coders, the hardware manufacturers, the financial officers and the business executives of Silicon Valley describe us, the public, as “users,” this is not just a casual slip of the tongue. It may be time to Richard Nixon ’em and start a Drug War.

The fun of technology usually refers to its ability to offer the spiritual equivalent of carnival cotton candy. On our televisions and phones we encounter media that ranges from memes and cat videos to shootings and riots; mostly in the span of a few seconds. For a sputtering attendant of a carnival, this is entertaining, mixed with the bluster of a giggle and snort. As a citizen of the United States of America, where we hold rights and responsibilities as governors of our government (of the people, by the people and for the people), this is sick.

We have certain requirements to maintain civil discourse and government. These are not easily run roughshod. These devices are a new way that democratic citizens can organize to pressure regional, national and global actors to better behavior. Unfortunately, citizens, utilizing the ability to write something semi-permanent and universal on a website, generally write and transmit the worst that humans have ever written. This is for a variety of reasons, but one of them is that I haven’t, for example, ever been able to share the worst of me with other people on a screen who share similar tendencies. Further, the Silicon Valley mavens do their best at creating services that do not serve the good of their customers but instead enchant as much of their eyes and their activity as possible. In order us to use and create our technology well, we must be responsible. Responsible CEOs, coders and customers. We ought to use our technology to clarify important issues to decide and act based on discernment, not to create unnecessary uncertainty and confusion.

This responsibility, this step forward, this course of action should not be taken lightly. It is putting one’s spirit, soul and body in progress. One cannot have one foot in and one foot out. If part of you does not want progress, cut it out. It is better to progress maimed than remain manipulated and used by enemy forces.

This gets to a fundamental question. Why should it be cut out? Is technology good or bad? This is complex, but from the perspective of forming a healthy society, myself healthy and that of my friends, we may ask what prevents this. I would like you to consider the good found in living together in a manner that respects our integrity, character and skills. Then pose the question, “Why is this not society?”

As a spiritual man, I declare, temptation, the flesh and the Devil. As a social writer, I continue.

The train, car and plane enable us to travel farther and faster. The telegram, radio and internet send messages across great distances of space in meager time. The plumbing, electricity and refrigeration of our households ease our daily habits. But how about that other side of advancement? To the uninitiated, this may be strange: a negative to–development? In many ways, we convict ourselves that if something allows us to do something in less time, with less energy and less struggle, then we are improved by it. But I declare here that sometimes more time is good, more energy is worthwhile and greater struggle is helpful. By taking our time, we allow for a greater restfulness, providing more space for ourselves to appreciate who we are, where we are and what we may do with our peace. Through using more energy, one grants the activity they are engaging in with greater significance, coming nearer to the natural amount of energy that goes into the otherwise subsumed, curtailed and reduced version of their activity.

Through great struggle, one comes to wrestle with the significance of who they are. Is dependency on technologies and industrially-manufactured goods the fulfillment of civilization or is it another phase? Perhaps, in our struggle to make things easy, we have forgotten the importance of patience, relationship and solidarity.

May we return to an early historical epoch? I wish to describe a time that, though within a few generations, is receding from memory. I am describing this because it shows an important human experience in the face of the introduction of machines to civilization. The usual historical survey states the Industrial Revolution began in earnest in England in the late 18th century. The changes to their society involved the replacement of human labor with machines and more heavy economic production, like puddling (iron production) and steam power. The economic and political activity involved in the establishment of industry is immense and the human being’s own power to produce at smaller scale is reduced. These technological, political and labor changes fomented rebellion among the Luddites. These angry citizens were outraged by the pride of the industrialist who proposed to rob them of their jobs and way of living in the name of his factory and his goods. The mass-produced clothing of the factory made the handspun, artisanal work of the journeyman and master less valuable. In nodal terms, that is, network science, English society was composed of sparse networks of important nodes, where people would provide a significant amount of benefit by their own work and be compensated accordingly. With industrialization, the big factories absorbed the smaller productive nodes because of their economies of scale and mechanized production. The human makers were driven out by the human owners of industrial machinery. Thus, these Luddites decided to drive out these few human machine owners.

They broke into factories, sabotaged the machines that threatened their vocation and declared mottos about the importance of the work of their hands. They fought for their autonomy in the face of a time of bigness and machinery. Because of their agitation and destruction of property, the industrialists lobbied the government. Many times, these owners were already involved in the government and had great friends. Because of their money, because of their social capital, because the owners of the machines are in a sense, characteristically, deeply involved in the processes and attitudes of monarchical government, the government proceeded to round up the Luddites, imprisoned them and executed them.

The Luddites were made pariahs, nearly to this day. The champions of their individual, self-reliant and autonomous way of life were shut-out by those people who owned the machines and those who, as is all too-often in goverment, rule for stability and compliance rather than the greatest good for as many sovereign humans as possible. The government sided with those who owned money, land and machines. Through time, they made a more dependent and compliant populace by enslaving them in workplaces that treated them poorly. When the Luddites were imprisoned and executed, the remaining English workers went to work on Monday. For the past 200 years, they have done the same. Thankfully, workers have decreased their weekly hours, from about 80 in the year 1840 to 40 in the year 1940. However, we have not budged on this point since 1940. Have we just found the right balance? Or have the human owners of these machines and those people in the government simply found a way of selling us their goods as the Good?

Next time you open your phone, wonder if you are looking at cat videos because you have been dissociated from real production, real involvement in work and responsibility in life.

The economic development around the world has a slough of benefits and costs. This is its dual nature. As development increases, we become more reliant on its tools and institutions. To the extent that we rely on its tools and institutions with the neglect of the capacity of we as human beings, we have done so to our detriment.

I consider us, me, you: the human being as fundamentally free, able to learn and contribute to the well-being of themselves and others, and competent to organize, produce and collaborate with other people. We have done this throughout our history, to greater and lesser degrees. In my judgment of the dignity of the human being, our good, and so advancement, development or progress is to increase the ability of every person and better their relationships. In light of this, it is important to analyze historical, technological and social changes according to their effect on us, as individuals and members of a community.

The following is a general critique. As schools increase their prevalence, more people are schooled, but many more of us learn that in order to be intelligent, one must be schooled. The potential for the person to demonstrate their competence, outside of council-committee approved categories, is impaired. Indeed, even the ability to imagine that someone may have that knowledge outside of an official school or university in many cases even offends those people who are in or went through these institutions. I remember being in a philosophy class and hearing the professor decry an email of philosophical work he received from someone outside of the institution, noting that he was not an academic. This is blindness, not wisdom. Roads increase mobility, but they also make things farther from the home. What would have been a local community of artists convocates in the city arts center; a nearby building that would have held general goods went out of business because a more well-stocked chain store appeared in the city nearby; the services that would have been available locally are absorbed into the city’s domain of influence. Thus, roads and cars that intended to make things easier to reach have made things farther away. In network science, these relationships are called attractor effects, where a node or a process in a network attracts greater influence because of its ability to subsume the operations of other nodes or processes in the network. In the context of human society, this subsumption, without regard to the benefit and good of every individual human being and their relationships, or even worse, toward the benefit of a few rather than the many, is bad.

May we use knowledge for good? What is its fruit?

To paraphrase God, “You will surely die.” (He probably did not speak King James English). From the beginning, the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil ensured death. Nonetheless, we are called to boldly discern between good and evil. Technology that enslaves, goods that bring bad, a people so subsumed by their phones and Internet that they are unable to have stable relationships–this is not the goal of civilization. I pray that we find a way of living with each other, convivially, rather than making theft, force and manipulation a way of life.

P.S.–As a Christian, I must write this.

I declare it is foolish for us to imagine liberation ensuing from knowledge, that which caused our mortal coil. It is only through our reunion with and living through the Creator that we are enabled to relieve our conviction, ransomed by the blood of God spilled for us and the Holy Spirit that resurrected Him bestowed upon each of us. Too many times, discussions for the betterment of society, rather then ascend into the heights of progress, descend into the pits of arguments or the trap of negative feeling. May you find what blessed you here and leave the rest.

Stand up, friends, brothers and sisters. God wants to pour living water into your wounds and heal you eternally. God bless you.